Showing posts with label Sig Lonegren. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sig Lonegren. Show all posts

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Imbolc: Bridgit's Day


The Blessings of Bridgit to you!  In olden days, and to this day still in Ireland great fires were lit on hilltops in honor of Bridgit, Goddess and Midwife to the new born, Smith of fire craft and metal, Goddess of love and marriage, Lady of the seed, and the new milk................just about all good things were seen as the blessings of Bridgit.  In fact, and many don't know this, Britain was named after Bridgit.  Great Britain, Great Bridgit.  Her roots go very far back to prehistoric times.  

This is a significant day because it is the day of quiet, unseen Germination, in the roots, under the sleeping Earth,  the very beginning of the awakening of new life as the sun begins to warm and illuminate the world.  Bridgit's Day.  

Here is a lovely little article from geomancer and Earth Mysteries teacher Sig Lonegren,  who first taught me to dowse and introduced me to.......well, what became my life work.  But that's another story. Time to begin to germinate those seeds!  
 

 "Imbolc is that time of the Celtic yearly cycle when the seed that was planted at Samhain (1 November) and lies dormant through the dark of the winter, by throwing out that little cotyledon, moves by itself for the first time.  It is analogous to the quickening in the human reproductive cycle.  It has a life of its own.  In Vermont, where I used to live,  an underground chamber called Rodwin is oriented toward the Imbolc Sunset. 

Here in Glastonbury, the Pilgrim Reception Centre sponsored a new Holy Thorn (the old one on Wearyall Hill was vandalised).  This cutting from the old Holy Thorn was planted next to a new World Peace Pole as well as a bench for visitors to rest on.

Imbolc is the time when ideas or plans that have been lying fallow in the dark all winter are now ready to begin a life of their own.  What projects have you been thinking about that are ready to begin to move, to manifest?  Use this time of Imbolc to feel that quickening, and be ready to give birth."

Sig Lonegren
Mid-Atlantic Geomancy


Bridgit in performance.  Photo by Thomas Lux


Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Sig Lonegren on Sacred Sites and Consciousness


"My understanding was that the driving factor in the construction of purpose-built sacred spaces in prehistoric times was the loss of the ability of more and more of humanity to connect on a conscious level with the world of spirit.  I felt, and still do, that the archaeoastronomy, sacred geometry and Earth Energies all enhanced the ability of this connection as we became more and more left-brain/rational."

Over the years I've included in this Blog articles by Sig Lonegren,  who I consider an important teacher for me.  Recently I found a 2012 UTube Interview with him, and felt like sharing it here.  For those interested in Earth Mysteries, follow the links to Sig Lonegren, his writings and interviews or videos..........and you will travel down a fascinating path that challenges paradigms.

Sig is a dowser and a geomancer, and he has spent many years exploring  sacred places, in England, Europe, and in the U.S.  As a dowser myself, I've experienced shifts in energy - which means also shifts in  consciousness and perception -many times when visiting areas that are geomantically potent, be it the henge of Avebury,  or the labyrinth at Unity Church in Tucson. Sig demonstrated that Sites are able to change consciousness (raise energy) because they are intrinsically geomantically potent, and/or  they also become potent because of human interaction with the innate intelligence of place, what the Greeks called "genus loci".  Geomantic reciprocity - as human beings bring intentionality, reverence and focus to a particular place, building sacred architecture, or engaging in ritual.  Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to transform consciousness. 

Why would the ancient people who built Stonehenge spend generations hauling monstrous (and apparently specific) stones hundreds of miles to pose them in  circles, laid  in various alignments with the skies, seasons, and land? According to Sig, who references psychologist Julian Jayne's controversial 1970's book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, possibly because, as human culture and language became increasingly complex,  we began to lose mediumistic consciousness,  a daily, conversant Gnosis.  With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning he suggests the ancients developed a concern with how to continue contact with the gods, the ancestors, the numina of the land. 

 Stonehenge was a temple on a sacred landscape - according to Sig, it may also represent a "last ditch effort" to keep in touch with the spirit world as communal experience.   As the rift between personal gnosis and spiritual contact deepened,  gradually  Gnosis was replaced by complex religious institutions that removed individuals from the earlier tribal mind, and rendered spiritual authority to priests who were often viewed as  the sole representatives of  the  Gods or God.  

 As Sig has commented:

"I have been arguing for decades that these (sacred) spaces were special places that enhance the possibility of connection to the other side - to the One.  Please judge what follows in that context. You may well find that it challenges some of your paradigms you hold about the past.  It combines two separate lines of investigation that support the perception that these spaces really “did what’s on the box.”  The gods came to earth.  And us humans in great numbers communicated directly with them.  

Since the mid-seventies when I began work on my Masters’ degree on Sacred Space, one of the major themes I have chewed on has been the shift from the dominance of that more intuitive right brain in prehistory to the analytical left brain brought to us by (IMHO) the increase of influence of the Patriarchy.  The book that really turned me on initially was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, first published in 1976. 

I don’t agree with some of what he has to say, for example, his choice of a particular word to describe how our prehistoric ancestors received their right brain information - "hallucinations."  I don't think that's what they were.  But on the whole, I found his thesis most useful in forming my perception of this global shift in consciousness.   It began with the Neolithic Revolution - the increasing use of agriculture rather than hunter gathering.  It facilitated a shift in consciousness.  My understanding was that the driving factor in the construction of purpose-built sacred spaces in prehistoric times was the loss of the ability of more and more of humanity to connect on a conscious level with the world of spirit.  I felt, and still do, that the archaeoastronomy, sacred geometry and Earth Energies all enhanced the ability of this connection as we became more and more left-brain/rational.  I wrote about this at great length in my first book, Spiritual Dowsing, initially published in 1986."

Sig Lonegren (2012)






References:

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. (Available from Amazon Books.)

Lonegren, Sig. 2007. Spiritual Dowsing. Glastonbury, England: Gothic Image. History of the earth energies, healing and other uses of dowsing today. A book for the spiritual pilgrim. Initially published 1986. ISBN 978-0-906362-70-9.  (Available from Amazon books).

Sunday, August 16, 2020

Numina: Spirits of Place in Myth and Nature



Numina: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage


Blogger is about to change to its new version, which I and many others don't like at all, and because of this I feel obliged to pull up some of my favorite posts, perhaps for fear that they will soon be lost or very hard to find.   I began this Blog in 2007 to document my Aldon B. Dow Fellowship at Northwood  University, where I followed, with art and spoken word, my  trail of the Spider Woman.   Since then there have been  over a thousand posts, and thousands of readers, for  which I am most grateful!  

Like many, our attitude is "if it's not broken, don't fix it".  We love this Blog look and format.  But apparently Google does not.  The "new Blogger" will make it much harder to access older posts, and it is designed for scrolling fast through cell phones, reducing, in my opinion, the average attention span from a minute or so  to a microsecond.   Just what we all need, more speed.

So - here is an article I love, and haven't revisited this subject for quite some time, although I remember to thank the Numina of my garden each morning, and I think of the little offerings of insense and rice and fruit that Balinese women make to the Gods, and to their own versions of the Numina, each and every morning.  

In this article from 2013 I was thinking, based on my own spiritual and mythic experiences, about the importance of Pilgrimage to the formation of mythology.  I was thinking that pilgrimage - going to a special place with receptivity and spiritual intention -  may have much to do with the actual interaction between place and society throughout human history. 





“To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own identity….what endured was the mythic landscape.”
R.F. Foster, (2001, p. 130)


 The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, the “genius loci” of a particular place. I personally believe many mythologies may be rooted in the experience of “spirit of place”, the numinous, felt presence within a sacred landscape. 

To early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic conversation”, a conversation within which human beings participate in various ways. Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. Mything place provides a language wherein the “conversation” can be spoken and interpreted, and personified. Our experience changes when Place becomes “you” or “Thou” instead of “it”. 

In the past, “Nature” was not just a “resource”; the natural world was a relationship within which human cultures were profoundly embedded. The gods and goddesses arose from the powers of place, from the powers of wind, earth, fire and water, as well as the mysteries of birth and death. In India, virtually all rivers bear the name of a Goddess. In southwestern U.S., the “mountain gods” dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona, Baboquivari, sacred mountain to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there and will not allow visitors without tribal permission. This has been a universal human quest, whether we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey, ubiquitous mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome: the landscape was once populated with intelligences that became personified through the evolution of local mythologies.


 The early agrarian Romans called these forces “Numina”. Every river, cave or mountain had its unique quality and force –its inherent Numen. Cooperation and respect for the Numina was essential for well-being. And some places were places of special potency, such as a healing spring or a sacred grove.

As monotheistic religions developed, divinity was increasingly removed from nature, and the natural world lost its “personae”. In the wake of renunciate religions that de-sacralized nature and the body, and then the rapid rise of industrialization, nature has become viewed as something to use or exploit, rather than a relationship with powers that require both communion and reciprocity. Yet early cultures throughout the world believed that nature is alive, intelligent, and responsive, and they symbolized this through local mythologies. From Hopi Katchinas to the Orisha of Western Africa, from the Undines of the Danube to the Songlines of the native Australians, from Alchemy’s Anima Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the resident “spirit of place”, the Genius Loci. 

Contemporary Gaia Theory revolutionized earth science in the 1970’s by proposing that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, interdependent and continually evolving in its diversity.  The Gaia Hypothesis, which is named after the Greek Goddess Gaia, was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science, of which are integral and interdependant.   In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all life forms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia.  In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be the results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the co-evolving diversity of living organisms.


If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it might follow that everything has the potential to be responsive in some way, because we inhabit and interact with a vast living ecological system, whether visible to us or not. Sacred places may be quite literally places where the potential for “interaction” is more potent. There is evidence that Delphi was a sacred site to prehistoric peoples prior to the evolution of Greece. Ancient Greeks built their Temple at Delphi because it was a site felt to be particularly auspicious for communion with the Goddess Gaia. Later Gaia was displaced by Apollo, who also became the patron of Delphi and the prophetic Oracle. Mecca was a pilgrimage site long before the evolution of Islam, and it is well known that early Christians built churches on existing pagan sacred sites.

There is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places that can change consciousness. Before they became contained by churches, standing stones, or religious symbolism, these “vortexes” were intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.

Roman philosopher Annaeus Seneca junior commented that:
 "If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numen."



Personal Encounters

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one morning I went down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont’s mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain, the subject of a popular book by Barry Fell, a Harvard researcher, and under continual exploration by the New England Archeological Research Association (NEARA). I had stumbled upon their yearly Conference. Among them was Sig Lonegren , a well-known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in Glastonbury, England and was then teaching at Goddard College in Vermont. Through his spontaneous generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly framing the Summer Solstice.

Fell and others suggest that Celtic colonists built these structures, which are very similar to cairns and Calendar sites found in Britain and Ireland; others maintain they were created by a prehistoric Native American civilization, but no one knows for sure who built them. They occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River. Approaching the site on the side of Putney Mountain, I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away. I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the huge top stone of that submerged chamber, my divining rod “helicoptered”, letting me know, according to Sig, that this was the “crossing of two leys”; a potent place geomantically.


According to many contemporary dowsers, telluric energy moves through stone and soil, strongest where water flows beneath the earth, such as in springs, and also where there is dense green life, such as an old growth forest. Telluric force is affected by planetary cycles, season, the moon, the sun, and the underground landscape of water, soil and stone. Symbolically this “serpentine energy” has often been represented by snakes or dragons. “Leys” are believed to be lines of energy, not unlike Terrestrial acupuncture lines and nodes, that are especially potent where they intersect, hence dowsers in Southern England, for example, talk about the “Michael Line” and the “Mary Line”, which intersect at the sites of many prehistoric megaliths, as well as where a number of Cathedrals were built.

At the time I knew little about dowsing, but I was so impressed with my experience that months later I gathered with friends to sit in the dark in that chamber, while we watched the summer Solstice sun rise through its entrance. We all felt the deep, vibrant energy there, and awe as the sun rose to illuminate the chamber, we all left in a heightened state of awareness and empathy.


 Earth mysteries researcher John Steele wrote in EARTHMIND, a 1989 book written in collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubrin, that we suffer from what he called “geomantic amnesia”. We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”, lost the capacity to engage in what he termed “geomantic reciprocity”. Instinctively, mythically, and practically, we have lost the sensory and imaginative communion with place and nature that informed our ancestors spiritual and practical lives, to our great loss. 

We diminish or destroy, for money, places of power long revered by generations past, oblivious to the unique properties it may have, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of intrinsically auspicious. Our culture, versed in a “dominator” and economic value system, is utterly ignorant of the significance of place that was of vital importance to peoples of the past. Re-discovering what it was that inspired traditional peoples to decide on a particular place for healing or worship may be important not only to contemporary pilgrims, but to a way of seeing the world we need to regain if we are to continue into the future as human culture at all. 

Making a pilgrimage to commune in some way with a sacred place is a something human beings have been doing since the most primal times. Recently unearthed temples in Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe reveal a vast ceremonial pilgrimage site that may be 12,000 years old. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia. 

One of the most famous contemporary pilgrimages is the “Camino” throughout Spain, which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella. Compostella comes from the same linguistic root as “compost”, the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter – the “dark matter” to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. Pilgrims arriving after their long journey are being metaphorically ‘composted’, made new again. When they emerge from the darkness of the medieval cathedral in Compostella, and from the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return home with their spirits reborn.

In 2011 I visited the ancient pilgrimage site of Glastonbury, England. Glastonbury’s ruined Cathedral once drew thousands of Catholic pilgrims, and Glastonbury is also Avalon, the origin of the Arthurian legends, the Lady of the Lake and King Arthur - a prehistoric pilgrimage site with origins that go back to unknown beginnings.

To this day thousands, like myself,  still travel to Glastonbury for the festivals held there, and for numerous metaphysical conferences, including the Goddess Conference I attended. The sacred springs of the Chalice Well and the White Spring have been drawing pilgrims since long before recorded history, and many people, like myself,  come still to drink their waters. 


Making this intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, very personal sense of the “Spirit of Place”, what some call the “Lady of Avalon” and taking some of the waters from the Holy Springs back with me  is ever a reminder of the dreams, synchronicities and insights I had there.  A trip to the Chalice Well in the winter of 2018 resulted in a profound experience of syncronicity and communion I can only call magical.


Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of human interaction. “Mythic mind”, the capacity to interpret and interact with self, others and place in symbolic terms (as, for example, the way the Lakota interpret “vision quest” experiences) further facilitates the communion. 

Sig Lonegren, who is one of the Trustees of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and a famous dowser, has speculated that as human culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we began to lose mediumistic, empathic consciousness, a daily intuitive gnosis with the “subtle realms” that was further facilitated by ritual. Dowsing is a good example of daily gnosis. “Knowing” where water is something many people can do without having any idea of how they do it. Sometimes, beginning dowsers don’t even need to “believe” in dowsing in order to, nevertheless, locate water with a divining rod.
With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with the development of patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and individual gnosis was gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God. The “conversation” stopped, and the language to continue became obscured or lost.

Perhaps this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning to us now as a new evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic pathways to the Numina.


References:

Foster, R.F.(2001) , The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press), page 130.

Lovelock, J. and Margulis, L., (1970) The Gaia Hypothesis, quote is from Wikipedia
Retrieved on: May 11, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis


Seneca, L. Annaeus junior (65 A.D.) Epistulae Morales at Lucilium, 41.3.
Retrieved on: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium


Fell, B. (1976, 2013). America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World
Artisan Publishers, N.Y.

Raine, L. , EARTHSPEAK:  Envisioning a Conversant World, Presentation Conference on Current Pagan Studies, Claremont, CA. 2018.   https://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/2020/03/earth-speak-envisioning-conversant-world.html

Lonegren, S. (2013) Mid Atlantic Geomancy, Blog. Retrieved on: http://www.geomancy.org/

Steele, J. (1989). Earthmind: Communicating with the living world of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux and David Kubrin. Harper & Row: N.Y. Page 157.




Sunday, April 22, 2018

Sacred Places and "Talking with the Gods"


"Australian dream time seems strange to us because we distinguish stories from places.  For the aborigines places are stories:  song-lines.  To "settle" a wild place means to create not only houses and farms, but also the stories that make them a home.  For native Australians, their deserts are home because they are verdant with stories."

David Loy, The World is Made of Stories

I have acquired a rare video called GEOSOPHY - An Overview of Earth Mysteries, produced and directed by Vakasha Brenman (Mystic Fire Video) in 1988  which features interviews with John Steele and Paul Devereux, authors of EARTHMIND and co-creators of the Dragon Project, a decade long investigation into the phenomena associated with Neolithic sacred sites in Great Britain.  Earth Mysteries has always been my passion, and the sense of Gaia, the living Earth, always speaking to us beneath our feet and in our cells..........is the fundamental truth I am always seeking to speak of in my art.  Gaia.  Mother Earth.  So very much we have lost and forgotten.  I feel the work of these people is very important, and should not be lost.  So I intend to put excerpts from this documentary on this Blog (and hope I don't get in trouble for it), and to pursue the subject of "Talking with the Earth" in future posts.  In this time of political and ecological despair, this matters to me.  This is worth sharing!   


There are so many stories I could tell as I look back on how this subject informed my art, worldview, spirituality, and sense of purpose.   I often credit a  synchronistic encounter  with geomancer and spiritual dowser  Sig Lonegren, in 1982, that planted the seed of a whole new way of seeing life for me, as well as teaching me to dowse.  I had a studio in Putney, Vermont in 1982, and it was my habit to meander down to the Putney Inn for coffee on a Saturday morning.  But that particular morning in June there were people everywhere - tables with brochures set up, discussions going on, buses and vans out front.  Coffee in hand, I saw an interesting group of people sitting on the grass in a circle in front of the building, and for some reason I sat down and joined them.  Sig, who was leading this group to one of Putney's mysterious stone chambers on Putney mountain, ushered us all into a van, and invited me to come along as well.  So that's how I found myself before a stone cairn in the woods, roofed with a massive stone, and with an entrance that faced perfectly the rising of the sun on the Summer Solstice.  Sig put a pair of divining rods in my hands, and I was  amazed to learn, with the others, that two "leys", each about 6 feet wide, ran through and crossed at this chamber.  When I held one of the rods at the center of the "roof" it "helicoptered"......turned rapidly as if it was a windmill for earth energies! 


It was many years later that I had the privilege of visiting  Sig and his wife Karen at their home in Glastonbury, England.  Sig was one of the trustees of the Chalice Well, and had spent many years exploring the sacred sites of the British Isles. I celebrated Lammas with them at the Chalice Well, an event I shall always treasure.   Sig is  currently on the faculty of the Fellowship of the Spirit near Lilydale, N.Y., he has a fascinating website:  http://www.geomancy.org/       and now lives with his wife in the Netherlands.   One of Sig's books, Spiritual Dowsing, goes into the phenomena of dowsing for Earth energies. 


As a dowser myself, I've experienced shifts in energy - which means also shifts in  consciousness and perception -many times when visiting areas that are geomantically potent, be it the henge of Avebury,  or the labyrinth at Unity Church in Tucson. Sites are able to change consciousness (raise energy) because they are intrinsically geomantically potent, and  they also become potent because of human interaction with the innate intelligence of place, what the Greeks called "genus loci".  John Steele coined the term "Geomantic reciprocity" - as human beings bring intentionality, reverence and focus to a particular place, building sacred architecture, or engaging in ritual.  The conversation becomes more active as place accrues myth and story in the memory of the people, and the memory of the land.   Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to transform consciousness.  And the power of myth is important if we wish to engage the numinous presence, to  "talk to the Goddess and petition the Gods".
"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

R.F. Foster

Why would the ancient people who built Stonehenge spend generations hauling monstrous (and apparently specific) stones hundreds of miles to pose them in  circles, laid  in various alignments with the skies, seasons, and land?   


According to Sig, who references psychologistcontroversial book from the 80's  The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, possibly because, as human culture and language became increasingly complex,  we began to lose mediumistic consciousness,  a daily, conversational Gnosis with "Spirit".  We became more individuated.  With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning he suggests the ancients developed a concern with how to continue contact with the gods, the ancestors, the numina of the land.  Stonehenge was a temple on a sacred landscape - according to Sig, it may also represent a "last ditch effort" to keep in touch with the spirit world, to enhance communal experience.   As the rift between personal gnosis and spiritual contact deepened, and especially with the later development of patriarchal institutions, gradually the tribal and individual Gnosis was replaced by complex religious institutions that removed individuals from the earlier tribal mind, and rendered spiritual authority to priests who were often viewed as  the sole representatives of  the  Gods or God.


Perhaps this capacity is returning to us, a new evolutionary balance. As crisis engulfs us, we need, once again, to re-member how to  "speak to the Earth". 


"I have been arguing for decades that these (sacred) spaces were special places that enhance the possibility of connection to the other side - to the One.  Please judge what follows in that context. You may well find that it challenges some of your paradigms you hold about the past.  It combines two separate lines of investigation that support the perception that these spaces really “did what’s on the box.”  The gods came to earth.  And us humans in great numbers communicated directly with them.  (I end with a counter argument just to keep things in balance.

Since the mid-seventies when I began work on my Masters’ degree on Sacred Space, one of the major themes I have chewed on has been the shift from the dominance of that more intuitive right brain in prehistory to the analytical left brain brought to us by (IMHO) the increase of influence of the Patriarchy.  The book that really turned me on initially was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, first published in 1976 (see "Works Cited" at the bottom for all book references).  

 I must say that this has been one of the most stimulating and thought-provoking books I've ever read, and is a must in the development of consciousness studies.  I don’t agree with some of what he has to say, for example, his choice of a particular word to describe how our prehistoric ancestors received their right brain information - "hallucinations."  I don't think that's what they were, and later on, I'll go in to why I think so.  But on the whole, I found his thesis most useful in forming my perception of this shift in consciousness.

It began with the Neolithic Revolution - the increasing use of agriculture rather than hunter gathering.  It facilitated a shift in consciousness.  My understanding was that the driving factor in the construction of purpose-built sacred spaces in prehistoric times was the loss of the ability of more and more of humanity to connect on a conscious level with the world of spirit.  I felt, and still do, that the archaeoastronomy, sacred geometry and Earth Energies all enhanced the ability of this connection as we became more and more left-brain/rational.  I wrote about this at great length in my first book, Spiritual Dowsing, initially published in 1986."

Sig Lonegren
www.geomancy.org
www.sunnybankglastonbury.co.uk


--------------------------------------------------

Jaynes, Julian. 1976. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Lonegren, Sig. 2007. Spiritual Dowsing. Glastonbury, England: Gothic Image. History of the earth energies, healing and other uses of dowsing today. A book for the spiritual pilgrim. Initially published 1986. 

Saturday, February 10, 2018

"Numina", and the Intelligences of the Living Earth


NUMINA:  Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage
By Lauren Raine MFA

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced:  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was the mythic landscape."

    R.F. Foster 1

The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, the "genius loci" of a particular place.   I personally believe many mythologies may be rooted in the actual experience of “spirit of place", the numinous, mysterious, felt presence within a sacred landscape. 

To early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic conversation”, a conversation within which human beings may participate in various ways.  Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious. “Mything place” provides a language wherein the “conversation” can be symbolically spoken and interpreted, as well as personified.    Our experience, and our relationship with Place changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it". 

  In the past, "Nature" was not just a "backdrop" or a "resource"; the natural world was a vast relationship within which human cultures were profoundly embedded and interactive.   The gods and goddesses arose from the powers of place, from the powers of wind, earth, fire and water, as well as the human mysteries of birth and death. 

In India, virtually all rivers bear the name of a Goddess.  In southwestern U.S., the “mountain gods” dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona where I live, Baboquivari, sacred mountain to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there.  This has been a universal human quest, whether we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey, ubiquitous mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome:  the landscape was once populated with intelligences that became personified through the evolution of local mythologies.   

"The Desert Spring", mask from 2013 performance with Ann Waters
 The Romans called these forces “Numina”.  Every valley, orchard, healing spring or womb-like cave had its unique quality and force - its Numen.   Cooperation and respect for the Numina, the animating intelligences of place, was essential for well-being.  And some places were regarded as imbued with special power, they were special places of pilgrimage.

With the evolution of patriarchal monotheism and religions that increasingly removed divinity from Nature and from the body, and, in the past century, the rapid rise of industrialization, we have increasingly looked at the world from a "users" point of view instead of a participatory one.  This overview tends to view the natural world as an object to be used or exploited, forgetting indeed that virtually all pre-industrial human cultures have rich traditions that teach that  the world is alive and responsive.   From Katchinas to the Orisha, naiads to dryads, the Australian Dream Time to Alchemy's Anima Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the resident “spirit of place”, the Genius Loci.

In those reverent traditions, sacred places may be locations where the potential for revelation, healing, or transpersonal experience is especially potent, and many contemporary places of pilgrimage carry on this mythos. It’s well known that early Christians built churches on existing pagan sacred sites.   An example would be the numerous sacred wells that are dedicated to a Black Madonna in Europe, or a Saint in England, in much the same way the Oracle of Delphi was dedicated to Gaia, the primal Earth Mother of Greek mythology, and later to the God Apollo.

"Gaia", 2013 performance with Ann Waters
Contemporary Gaia Theory 2 proposes that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, utterly interdependent and always evolving.  A system of relationships.  If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it follows that everything has the potential to be “conversant” in some way, whether visible or invisible.    Ancient Greeks built their Oracle at Delphi because it was felt that it was especially auspicious for communion with the Goddess Gaia, and undoubtedly it was a site that was sacred to prehistoric peoples prior to the evolution of Greece.  

There is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places on our planet that change consciousness, and can catalyze insight, healing, or visionary experience, perhaps even, as the Oracle of Delphi believed, prophecy.  Before they became contained and mythologized by religions or designated by prehistoric monuments, these sites were intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.  

They touch all who visit, and ultimately, no particular belief system is needed for them to have a transformative effect, although human architecture and the accumulation of human psychic energy and visitation may amplify this effect.  

Roman philosopher Plinius Caecilius commented that:

"If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numina."3

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one fall morning I stumbled down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont's mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain.  Among them was Sig Lonegren 4, a well-known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in Glastonbury, England.  Through his generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly framing the Summer Solstice.  


No one knows who built these structures, which occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River, but approaching the site I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away.  I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as if I had antennas, quivering as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site.    Standing on the top of the somewhat submerged chamber, my divining rod "helicoptered", letting me know that this was the “crossing of leys”; a potent place geomantically.  

Months later friends gathered in the dark to sit in that chamber and watch the Solstice sun rise through its entrance way.  We all felt the power of the deep, vibrant energy there,  and awe as the sun rose illuminating the chamber.   None of us knew what to do, so we held hands and chanted.  We were all as “high as a kite” when we left.  

Earth mysteries researcher John Steele 5 wrote in  the 1989 book EARTHMIND  (in collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubin) that we suffer from "geomantic amnesia".  We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”, to engage in what he called "geomantic reciprocity"; instinctively, mythically, and practically, to our great loss.   We disregard for short term economic gain places of power, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of intrinsically auspicious.   Remembering, re-inventing, and re-claiming  what inspired early peoples  may be important not only to contemporary  pilgrims, but to creating future human societies that can be sustainable.

The act of making a pilgrimage to a sacred place is among the oldest of human endeavors. The Eleusinian Mysteries combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia.  One of the most famous contemporary pilgrimages is the "Camino" throughout Spain, which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella.  Compostella comes from the same root word as "compost",  the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter -  the "dark matter"  to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form.  As researcher and mythologist Jay Weidner has pointed out, pilgrims finally arriving in Compostella after their long journey are being 'composted' in a sense.  Emerging from the dark cathedral, and the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return home with their spirits reborn.

In 2011 I visited the ancient sacred springs of Glastonbury, the Chalice Well and the White Spring as well as participating in the international Goddess Conference there.   Making this intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, personal sense of the "Spirit of Place", what some call the "Lady of Avalon".  Pilgrimage opens one to blessing and vision, and can take us out of the ruts of our daily lives into transpersonal communion.

Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are intrinsically geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of human interaction with the innate intelligence of place, the Numina.  “Mythic mind” further facilitates the communion.   Sig Lonegren, who is a dowser, has spent many years exploring sacred places, and has commented that possibly, as human culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we began to lose mediumistic consciousness, a daily Gnosis with the "subtle realms" that was further facilitated by symbolism, mythology, and ritual. 

With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with the development of patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and individual Gnosis was gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God.  The “conversation” stopped, and the language to continue became obscure or lost. 

Perhaps this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning to us now as a new evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering the mythic pathways to the Numina.


References:

1 Foster, R.F., The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press 2001)

2 The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. The hypothesis, which is named after the Greek goddess Gaia, was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s.


3 C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus minor, Epistula 41.3, from Nova Roma, www.novaroma.org/nr/Numen

4 Lonegren, Sig, Mid Atlantic Geomancy, website and blog (http://www.geomancy.org/)

5 Steele, John, Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux and David Kubrin (Harper and Row, 1989)